I gave it a serious tryout and I wasn't all that impressed. I used it exclusively for a little over a week and wound up uninstalling it. To my mind, it has an odd feel about it.

One of my clients did an extended formal evaluation of productivity applications in February of this year. They put Word 2007, IBM Symphony, and Open Office through their paces. Bottom line: they overwhelmingly preferred Open Office Writer as their word processor.

For a stand alone word processing application, the relatively unknown Tomahawk PDF+ v3.0 Free Edition is an excellent choice. (http://www.nativewin...ftware/tpdfplus.html) This app deserves to be a lot better known. They also have a "Gold" edition that has a lot more features, but it will set you back about $36. IMHO still a bargain.

I installed recently Symphony of a Vista Machine and was quite surprised to see an excellent compatibility with Excel files, where functions are the same whereas for OpenOffice, last time I checked, they have their own functions, which is very annoying for me. I also like the "tab" approach and the fact that Symphony doesn't take over your .doc, .xls associations like openoffice where its' almost impossible to remove.